This month’s book is The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. 

In 1972 workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, find a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by residents of the Chicken Hill neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.

Everyone is invited to join in the conversation! We'll meet in the Courtyard at 7pm.

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